The Evolution & Medicine Review and the Evolution & Medicine Network were created in 2008 by Randolph Nesse and Catriona McCallum as a part of a year-long project to develop the field of evolutionary medicine while they were Fellows at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. The EvMed Review and the Network succeeded in connecting people and ideas relevant to evolutionary medicine, resources that proved useful when Steve Stearns founded the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health and a foundation to own the journal. The creation of a Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University made it possible to organize scientific meetings and transform the foundation into The International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health, which now sponsors the Review. Randolph Nesse continues as the Editor.
Evolutionary medicine is growing fast, but the gap between evolutionary biology and medicine remains large (Nesse & Stearns 2008). Few clinicians have a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology and few evolutionary biologists have experience in medicine. Relevant research is dispersed across many different existing disciplines including infectious disease, genetics, anthropology and psychology. Workers applying an evolutionary framework in one discipline often know little about relevant work in other disciplines. New research is neglected, and misgivings about a line of research can take years to surface.
The Evolution & Medicine Review aims to bridge the gap between medicine and evolutionary biology. It publishes news about ISEMPH events, other events and job postings relevant to evolution and medicine, links to relevant articles, and essays on current topics of interest to the evolution and medicine community.
Your contributions are welcome. Send news items, links to articles that others would like to know about, and ideas for possible essays to [email protected]